Kaya & Blank's Second Nature Exposes Cell Towers Dressed as Trees

A monograph titled Second Nature documents the cell towers disguised as trees that puncture Southern California's landscape, and it argues these fake palms and pines are monuments to a contradiction: we depend on technological infrastructure yet prefer its physical presence to stay out of sight.

The lens-based artist duo Kaya & Blank, who live in Los Angeles, photograph telecommunications equipment hidden beneath manufactured bark and synthetic foliage. The structures promise uninterrupted connection while preserving the look of an uninterrupted landscape. For the artists, that bargain is the real subject.

What does Los Angeles have to do with it?

Plenty. The city's practice of concealment extends well beyond telecom. Oil drilling facilities sit behind façades resembling ordinary office buildings, their industrial functions obscured by familiar architecture.

Offshore in Long Beach, the THUMS Islands take the strategy to the scale of a whole landscape. Built in the 1960s, these artificial oil islands deploy palm trees, sculptural walls, waterfalls and architectural screens to soften the sight and sound of extraction. From the shore, they can read as a holiday resort rather than a drilling operation. That local context, the artists argue, frames the cell-tower trees: environments where industrial activity is accommodated by giving it the appearance of something else.

Where did the fake antenna tree come from?

The history is precise. In 1992, officials in Monument, a mountain community in Colorado, rejected a proposed cellular tower because of its visual impact. The carrier needed another way. Larson, a company with experience building artificial landscapes for theme parks, aquariums and zoos, transformed the tower into a pine tree.

Techniques developed for immersive entertainment became tools for negotiating the appearance of everyday infrastructure. A local permitting problem grew into an international industry of concealment. And the disguise doesn't come cheap: industry representatives quoted by the Los Angeles Times say a tree tower can cost up to twice as much as a conventional tower of the same height.

The monograph includes a contribution from architectural historian Amy Clarke, who situates these structures within a broader history she calls "fool's gold architecture" — buildings and objects that appear to serve one purpose while functioning as something else. Houses conceal electrical substations. Residential façades mask ventilation facilities. Trees disguise antennas. Her writing suggests their significance lies not in whether they successfully deceive us, but in the desires and compromises they express. A disguise can stay effective as an aesthetic agreement even when everyone knows what it hides.

Why photograph camouflage that fails?

Because it usually does. Repetitive branches, oversized trunks and unlikely proportions draw attention to the very structures meant to stay invisible. Kaya & Blank find this failure revealing rather than disqualifying. The fake trees offer a recognisable sign of nature, letting an industrial object become socially acceptable without becoming natural. Their awkwardness exposes the negotiation between technological demand and scenic reassurance.

Beneath the synthetic foliage, the infrastructure stays stubbornly material. Equipment hums. Fences restrict access. Warning signs interrupt the promise of a benign landscape. During their fieldwork, the artists encountered fallen artificial branches and palm fronds — camouflage exposed as a surface that can break, deteriorate and become debris. Those encounters complicate the apparent immateriality of digital communication: connectivity depends on physical installations, and concealing them adds more manufactured material to the environment, contributing to pollution.

The title ties the constructed vegetation to habit — the "second nature" through which technological dependence becomes ordinary. These trees are neither convincing replicas nor merely absurd failures. They give visible form to a willingness to preserve an image of nature while expanding the systems that transform it.

Who are Kaya & Blank?

The duo works in lens-based media, examining how humans shape and inhabit the world. The influence of neoliberal politics on contemporary life has anchored their recent practice, and their projects often trace economic infrastructure to expose the politics embedded in built environments.

Their method compresses physical distances between existing structures into dense compositions of industrial fragments — new landscapes at once alien and familiar. Grounded in documentary practice and heavy research, they push representation until the boundary between reality and fiction blurs. They photograph almost exclusively at night, accentuating the artificial and uncanny qualities of urban environments; viewers frequently mistake the documentary elements for computer-generated imagery.

In exhibitions, that research becomes multilayered installation: photographs and videos alongside texts and objects, often in direct material connection to the subjects depicted. The Second Nature project suggests the pair will keep pressing on the same fault line — the manufactured scenery that lets industrial society pretend it isn't there.